Journal for the Study of Radicalism

E. Franklin Frazier is rightfully remembered as one of the most important and influential sociologists in the United States, and one of the nation's most prominent Black sociologists. Although Frazier deserves this fame, it tends to overshadow his lifelong radicalism and refusal to accept (in practice or theory) the naturalness of Black oppression in the United States. This radicalism infuses all of his writing, but is especially evident in his earlier writings when, rather than an academic, Frazier was best known as a radical "New Negro" voice. When Frazier died of cancer in 1962, the American Sociological Review ran an obituary by his Howard University colleague G. Franklin Edwards. This obituary notes Frazier published ninety-nine articles, but only mentions one by name, "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" from 1927. That article's "satirical style," Edwards notes, "bears a kinship to the technique employed by Frazier" in his famous Black Bourgeoisie. After noting "Frazier was forced by a white mob to leave Atlanta where he was then teaching" upon the publication of the article, Edwards underlines the two writings, "though published more than a quarter of a century apart, were tied together by more than a common style" because "in both of these works, Frazier demonstrated his determination to describe, analyze, and evaluate social reality as he perceived it, even when he was [End Page 73] fully conscious that his evaluation would not be accepted by a great many readers."¹ Another Howard colleague, English professor Arthur Davis, in an obituary in the Journal of Negro Education, stressed how the two writings underlined Frazier's insistence on telling the truth about race relations in the United States: "Early in his career, [Frazier] was run out of Atlanta for an article he wrote on Southern whites; he was 'lynched' in the Negro press for his Black Bourgeoisie."²

Sociologist St. Clair Drake referred to "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in his introduction to Frazier's The Negro Youth at the Crossways, published five years after Frazier's death: "Legend has proliferated about the circumstances of his retreat from Atlanta, with Frazier emerging from the telling as a sort of combative hero, fighting a rear-guard action against the Ku Klux Klan."³ One study of Frazier in the late 1980s noted that "the 1927 article has become a legend in black history."⁴ Ninety years after Frazier's article was published, a professor of African and African American Studies wrote about the article in an opinion column, "The Pathology of Delusion," denouncing racist threats against Black scholars.⁵

It is clear that as the hundred-year anniversary of Frazier's article approaches, it continues to resonate. At the same time, few scholars have examined Frazier's 1927 article or the circumstances surrounding its publication in depth. This lack of attention reflects the hybrid nature of the piece, as well as scholars' neglect of Frazier's early writings, which have tended to be overshadowed by his later works such The Negro Family in the United States and The Black Bourgeoisie. Frazier's importance to American sociology justifies this attention to his later writings, but overemphasizing them contributes to diminishing Frazier's radicalism and militancy and overlooking how the radical ideals of his earlier writings continued to infuse his later publications. In the 1920s, before he earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago, Frazier had already developed a radical critique of Black oppression in the United States, reflecting and contributing to the reenergized "New Negro" trend in Black politics and culture in the 1920s. Although the term encompasses divergent thinkers from Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey to socialists like A. Philip Randolph, New Negro writers emphasized Black self-respect and rejected the idea that Black people were psychologically or psychiatrically damaged.⁶ "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" reiterates themes central to Frazier's radial vision. [End Page 74]

Rather than being the precipitous event that is often depicted, the article's publication reflected the culmination of years of tension between Frazier and the leadership of the Atlanta School...